Simon,

There's a lot of people out here in the forum who do backup workstations.
They will probably give you more info on the pitfalls of it. Some of them
may even have success stories.

Our organistation takes a similar stand to yours - "if it's important then
keep it on the servers."

Agreed that this often pushes disk space to the limits, but a good
chargeback system should be able
to take care of that.

I think that you'll find that in most cases the administrative costs and
burden in backing up 1,000 workstations
will outweigh increasing the disk space on your servers.

You are also relying heavily on the user to initiate the backups here.
I also think that this is a bad idea. At the end of the day when they loose
data for whatever reason..
(forgot to initiate backups.. user thought it was backing up etc..) you can
bet that you will be the one to blame.

I believe that the futher that we distribute storage, that the harder it
becomes to manage and maintain.
The workstation backup may look like a nice cheap solution to management but
for the people managing it.. it's
a nightmare.

Nathan


        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Simon Watson [SMTP:simon.s.watson AT SHELL.COM DOT BN]
        Sent:   Monday, August 09, 1999 8:50 PM
        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        Subject:        PC Backups

        We are (very) successfully backing up UNIX and NT Servers with ADSM
(on
        AIX, 3494 & 3590).

        We are looking into the possibility of backing up a number (approx
        1,000) of the NT PCs around the organisation which have all this
disk
        space on them which people seem to like to use, instead of the
central
        LAN servers.  The corporate policy has always been that if it is
        important then store it centrally.  This policy is breaking down
        somewhat with the amount of data people want to keep and the already
        available disk space on their local PC, which is free.  The only
snag
        is there is no proper backup solution in place.

        I imagine many other larger organisations have struggled with this.
Do
        we keep data centrally, or provide a distributed backup solution for
PCs.

        I am sure ADSM can do the job.  We have the server capacity - I
think.
        We would need more client licenses of course.  But the
administrative
        overhead would be quite significant.

        If we did this we would use user initiated backups, and only backup
        specific directories eg C:\data.  All our PCs have pretty much
standard
        setups so we wouldn't want to backup the complete system for each &
        every PC.  And I imagine we would use separate storage pools from
our
        existing pools, without any collocation set.

        I would be keen to hear how other people have solved this particular
        problem.  Has anybody got a White paper or anything examining the
pros
        & cons of the two scenarios.

        Regards,
        Simon